“We are about to enter a new era in which each year less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have will be how to reduce energy usage and make the transition to renewable alternatives.”
from Oil Depletion and the Fate of the World, Post Carbon Institute

When humans first began practising agriculture, rather than wild harvesting, each pound of food we produced contained a little more stored energy from sunlight than humans (and their animals) had to expend to grow it.
Today, because modern industrial agriculture is extremely energy intensive, 400 - 700 times the energy stored in our food is used in all the processes that bring it to our plates. This energy deficit cannot be maintained on a finitely-resourced planet and has only been possible thus far because of the availability of cheap fossil fuels, stored energy from millions of years of natural processes at work on and in the planet.
Getting that food from the rather narrow band of agriculturally productive land nearer the equator where it usually grows, to our plates is a part of the problem with direct consequences on local travel. As fuels become scarcer, prices will rise further. These costs will be borne grudgingly by those who manage to maintain jobs in an economy that because of short supplies will shrink. Less work means less people working. The ranks of the poor, already affected by the devastating effects of globalization, will likely swell.
Mass transit, offered up as a panacea by short-sighted politicians and pundits, involves construction which itself requires stupendous amounts of fossil fuels, so unless we start the process now, right now, of moving to a mass transit world, it may not be available to us later.
Humankind grew from 1 billion to 6 billion in the last 150 years, partly because of our fossil fuel based industrial systems. These systems not only increased food production, but allowed all kinds of products to be transported great distances, and tremendously increased the efficacy of our health care delivery systems, both in quality and quantity. Without this source of cheap fuel our lives will dramatically change.

Promises

The same short-sighted politicians and politically-motivated pundits tell us we are moving to a hydrogen-based economy, only that is an illusion. Hydrogen may be one way to store energy in the future, but its production still requires more fuel energy than it creates and nobody has been able to find economical ways to separate hydrogen from other elements in large enough quantities to feed all our present requirements.
Coal and nuclear power are also touted as possible saviours, but both come at heavy environmental costs. There is no way to mine, move, burn and dispose of coal that does not create a suffocating toxic stew of pollutants.
As for nuclear energy, one has only to look at the Hanford nuclear site in the USA and its estimated $1 trillion cleanup costs to see that road is better left untravelled.
Natural gas, dwindling in the same way oil production is, is difficult and expensive to ship long distances. As well, new natural gas sites are depleting at much faster rates than oil fields.
Ethanol cannot replace even petroleum. To fuel the current US automobile fleet with ethanol would require all the land in the continental USA, leaving no room to grow food or live. And that fleet is growing each year.
Our best and perhaps only hopes lie with solar and wind power. But even they suffer from problems. Solar panel production and disposal causes pollution and the electricity generated is still expensive.
Wind is more promising and may yet prove to be the best solution, but electricity generation “is not well-suited to the powering of our current transportation and agricultural infrastructure, and the rebuilding of that infrastructure is itself a gargantuan task in both economic and energy terms.” (Oil Depletion and the Fate of the World, Post Carbon Institute)
Former US president Jimmy Carter wrote “We must face the prospect of changing our basic ways of living. This change will either be made on our own initiative in a planned way or forced on us with chaos and suffering by the inexorable laws of nature.”

Next month, we examine these two scenarios and explore how to make the better outcome the one we follow.

John William cares about the planet and how we live on it. Next month, he is also planning to review the film The End of Suburbia. johnwil@oberon.ark.com